Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday January 10, 2016 @07:56PM
from the which-ones-are-stolen? dept.

Jalopnik reports that Elon Musk's predicted window for being able (for Tesla owners, that is) to call up your autonomous car and have it find its own way from New York to California, or vice versa, is astonishingly close: 24-36 months from now. From the article:
As far as the summoning feature is concerned, Tesla plans for the 33-foot range to greatly expand—soon. Within two years, Musk predicted that owners will be able to summon their car from across the country.
“If you’re in New York and your car is in Los Angeles, you can summon your car to you from your phone and tell the car to find you,” Musk said. “It’ll automatically charge itself along the journey. I might be slightly optimistic about that, but not significantly optimistic.”
In getting from one place to another, Musk said autopilot “is better than human in highway driving, or at least it will be soon with machine learning.” If it’s not already better than human, Musk said it will be within the coming months.
But right now, Musk said the car still needs a human around, just in case.
“The car currently has sensors to achieve that cross-country goal,” Musk said. “But you’d need more hardware and software, you’d need more cameras, more radars, redundant electronics, redundant power buses and that sort of thing.

Their "self parking car" can just barely back itself out of a garage (limited to up to 39 feet) without anyone in the car. It seems unlikely that they'll transition from this to true autonomous long distance operation in 3 years.

It would an understatement to say that Elon Musk has made some outrageous predictions for his companies and the world. At this time, we can't be sure they'll come true because his due-dates are still in the future.

That said, it is believable to me that cross-country autonomy could be technically possible in 2 or 3 years. After all, going 33 feet is just the first step in going 33 more feet, and then 33 more, and so on. I think the current 33-foot limit is caused by early prudence rather than technology limitations.

What I find hard to accept the idea that it will be legally possible in 2 or 3 years. But, I wouldn't be surprised if Elon negotiated a special route with the governments of selected states, to provide a demonstration. And maybe a human convoy escorting it?

Google's self driving cars have racked up over 1 million miles in the past few years. They're probably already capable of a coast-to-coast autonomous trip - in good weather.What's uncertain is if they can cope with really poor driving conditions.http://venturebeat.com/2015/06... [venturebeat.com]

One million miles over probably less that 100 miles of road that has been scanned and analysed by people before the car is ever allowed to drive there. A Google car can not drive on city streets that have not been scanned and analysed recently. Drive a google car to another town and it is lost.

Autonomous vehicles going from A to B on the well marked, (mostly) pedestrian free interstate highway system is relatively easy. And with Tesla charging stations at some rest stops all one needs to do is add a few mapped "delivery lots" at popular exits and one has created a first-grade autonomous vehicle route.

I recall driving a rental car many years ago at about 9:30AM in a section of NYC that was very congested - and most of the cars were taxis (it was pretty much a sea of yellow). The only way to make progress was to play a little game of chicken with the taxi drivers and shove the nose of my car in front of their bumpers when there really wasn't enough room to do so "safely". And, that's exactly what they were doing with me and each other also so I didn't get honked at or cursed at -- it was just how you could get where you were going.

However everyone, myself included, was making what would be considered illegal lane changes and IF there had been an accident fault would have been allocated to the driver shoving their nose into the tiny bit of daylight between two cars in the adjacent lane.

I can't imagine that the google lawyers would let the engineers code the software to drive that way OR to come as close to pedestrians that were jaywalking here and there. I suspect a google self driving car would just sit there and start whimpering and maybe 12 hours later finally think it was safe to progress when traffic was lighter.

A more actual example... I was reading someone complaining because a google self-driving car was in front of them in a residential area and a garbage truck picking up rubbish was in front of the google car. The google car didn't have the sense to pass the truck (perfectly legal and what drivers normally do) as it stopped every 50 feet to pick up another bin all the way up the block. This left the person behind having to pass not only the truck, but the google car that was dutifully tailing the truck. The more google cars that piled up behind a garbage truck, the harder this passing would be.

In light rush hour where I live, there are all sorts of instances where merging onto a freeway requires playing a bit of chicken -- else you would end up at the end of the merge lane in a dead stop (and that's REALLY difficult to recover from and creates a giant mess for everyone). Sometimes someone will act unpredictably (either intentionally closing a gap to keep you from taking it or, more often, trying to "help" you at the last minute by trying to create a slot in front of them when you were planning on sliding in behind them). Other times, you just have to act like you're going to take a slot that's really a little too small to take without making someone slow down a bit (almost everyone is already closer to the car in front of them than they should be so there are no gaps to merge into leaving proper clearances behind and ahead of you). Again, I can't imagine the lawyers (or the programmers) allowing self-driving cars to be that aggressive and, in the end, I'll bet it won't be uncommon to see traffic jams caused by cars that couldn't merge "safely" so just stop at the end of the merge lane - that won't be popular.

Mixing self driving cars running code overseen by lawyers and conservative programmers with meat bag driven cars in congested situations seems to be very challenging. However, once on the freeway going in a straight line w/o any need to deviate, I'm pretty sure, on the average, self driving cars are/will soon be much safer than meat bag driven cars whose drivers are on their cell phone or shaving or putting on mascara (yep, I've seen that - amazing).

Exactly this. For this reason, I've found it easy to be dismissive of Google's claims. They have hardly discussed situations like this, not to mention bad weather, construction, etc. Google tends to promise big potential, then drop projects, because, hey, 'failure is good.'The problem with Elon's claims is that he has credibility. He has a history of doing exactly what he claims and persevering at it. So he is either putting his credibility at risk, or he has some ace up his sleeve to mitigate _all_ of the odd cases in the short term.I will say, in the long run the driverless car will change the nature of roadways in one way or another to eliminate the situations described. You can't really predict how these things unfold, but the basic underlying premise will change. But that is measured in decades, not 2 years.

It could also end with most of New York losing their drivers licenses over the entry months of self driving cars. Simply by automating reporting of dangerous drivers.Thats not even a scary ideal, but it would lead to lots of fun court time and messing around until the legal crisis that has been delayed for decades is forced to be solved.

It might be a legal crisis but, for some definition, it actually works. Remember, if it's behind your B pillar - it's not your fault. People keep saying that Google's got it covered and citing a million miles. I'm a little rusty and biased but I'd like to think that, at one time, I had the world's greatest traffic sim game. This might sound like an appeal to authority (indeed, it kind of is) but it's gonna be a while before we get even a simple majority of private passenger vehicles that are fully autonomou

I can't imagine that the google lawyers would let the engineers code the software to drive that way OR to come as close to pedestrians that were jaywalking here and there.

But when the tech becomes more mainstream, those conditions will change. The cars will talk to each other and take turns. Imagine if every car in NYC could communicate with every other, and determine an optimized traffic strategy throughout the city that reduces or eliminates jams.

The hard part will be the interim... how do we get to 100% automation without going through 10%, where these cars would cause more issues than they solve? I think the tech will pick up in rural areas and small cities first. I

I'd be willing to bet that they're better in really poor driving conditions than humans are.

Perhaps, but for now the most important thing is the effort to prove the self-driving car safe. If that means driving only in perfect weather and traffic conditions on pre-scanned roads with two professional human drivers, then so be it.

One thing I would like to see with autonomous cars is a new set of required lights when they are in operation. This way you can easily identify the cars that are driving themselves. Also at some point autonomous cars will network together on highways and form a virtual train. I think another beacon should be required when they are in this mode.

We really need to work on infrastructure in the US and making it easier for automated vehicles to be the norm would go a long way to reducing deaths and accidents

Why should they wait for "laws to be ready"? If every innovator would do that, we'd be still riding around on horses. When the car was invented, there for sure were no vehicle liability insurances. I'm sure that got sorted out soon enough after the first accidents though. Here the same. Let it happen. Of course the auto makers will do their utmost best for no accidents to happen (it's part of their business model after all), but it will happen, and then we'll see.

As long as in the worst case you are ready to due some hard time as you are the owner / the one who requested the car and when it hit the school bus well the local Officer Barbrady things you just ran off after crash.

I want a car that will drop me off at the store or the movies, go park itself and when I'm ready it will come to me in front of the store. The endless walking around in parking lots trying to remember where I park the car is a giant pain in the ass.

I think there is a reason these auto makers go for a "coast to coast" first. It's all highways, and easy driving.

Your problem is a much harder one: improperly mapped surroundings, lots of moving obstacles (ranging from people to dumpsters placed haphazardly), etc.

I'll be impressed when this car can do what you describe. Or navigate from one end of a big city to the other - without using the city's ring roads, but really going through city traffic, dealing with traffic lights, cyclists, detours, and all the other unexpected obstacles thrown at city drivers.

I've been in blinding blizzards on the highway. Storms where you are lucky to see the ditches on either side, forget about the lines in the middle or the shoulders. I'd like to know what's going to happen when one hits and the autonomous car is nowhere near a safe parking spot.

You are stuck using only visible light to perceive the world around you. Any autonomous system would have sensors that are working outside that band and hence are going to be more or less affected by various conditions. You would expect the system to use lidar, radar, and ultrasonic at the absolute minimum. It would also have sensors that are closer to the ground and at better angles than your eyes so while the lines may be invisible to you in the drivers seat the sensors can see them clearly.

My expectation of behaviour would be that the AI is able to make a remarkably accurate estimate of braking distance and then reduce its speed to a level where its sensor range exceeds that of braking distance + a margin of error.

But how will it track the road when it is under inches of snow? GPS will be spotty if it is working at all through heavy cloud. No lines, no visual cues. It can't stop on the shoulder because that would be dangerous for the car as well as other drivers. Driving at 20km/h is not an option for the same reason. I also question whether sensors on an *affordable* consumer vehicle would be sensitive enough not to get thrown off by heavy snow.

If the roads are that bad, only stupid drivers even attempt to go out in the first place. And when a snow storm happens (these things are usually predicted in advance nowadays) there is usually enough time to find a safe place to shelter before it gets to this kind of conditions.

If you say driving at 20 km/h is dangerous - when the vehicle does so due to stopping distance and risk of slipping so I assume you mean "dangerous as it's much slower than other traffic" - driving at any higher speed would be even

Wow... This is two days in a row where I get to suggest that you'd probably die if you lived where my home is. (I'm cheating and spending this winter in Florida.)

Seriously, if you stop traveling because there are a few inches of snow on the road - you're gonna die. We have periods where it simply doesn't stop snowing - for days. We have times when I, a private citizen, go out and help with the plowing, pull people out of ditches, and generally help clean things up. What would you do it you got four feet of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - This is what happens when humans encounter conditions where visibility reduces yet they still drive faster than their visible distance. If 20km/h is the maximum speed that a vehicle can stop at inside its visibility window then that is EXACTLY the max speed it should be travelling.

As for your example there must be some kind of visible cues otherwise you wouldn't know where the road goes. GPS is also no affected by water vapour in the atmosphere, it is however affected b

Well maybe it's just my Garmin, but it cuts out in snow storms. No sats available. I hope they'll be putting in something much stronger than that. Your theory doesn't work in real life, because there is always going to be some asshat barreling down the highway behind you. Driving 20 is a death sentence.

I think there is a reason these auto makers go for a "coast to coast" first. It's all highways, and easy driving.

Well, I think the large distance between origin and destination is supposed to show a high endurance.

Perhaps they should say coast to coast, with a special caveat, that the trip has to be done both in the rainy season, and in the dead of winter when there is heavy snow en route, original should be in a suburban area requiring some heavy city travel to get away from the origin, final desti

In pre-digital days I used to carry around a graphite-based stylus for noting the car's location on a carbon-based "tablet" with a nifty non-battery-reliant offline storage solution, though these days I just take a photo with my moble pocket computing device. Saves having to wait for reliable autonomous cars to be developed.

I went to a barbecue competition (large national one), and I came up with a great idea. Since I used my Garmin to get to the event when I parked I set a favorite location to where I was while sitting in the parked car. Then I got out and stowed the GPS on me.

When it was time to go home I turned the GPS back on (two hour battery runtime) and let it guide me back to the car's location.

I want a car that will drop me off at the store or the movies, go park itself

At this point.... why not just have a service provider with autonomous cars strategically parked throughout the city, and when you want a car, you push a button, and a self-driving car comes and gets you in a few minutes for a low monthly subscription+mileage fuel charge?

Then we reduce car ownership, and consequently, the amount of parking spaces required, as well, by an order of magnitude.

I used to drink - and drive. Oh, it was probably reasonably safe - as I was usually not on the road. I no longer do this, by the way. But, 'tis time for a Gramps Story...

At any rate, a buddy and I were out drinking and driving. I'd chosen a Subaru for this journey - this Subaru had one purpose in life and one purpose only. I bought it just to put it places that it was not meant to go - and it might surprise you the places that thing went. Oh, it'd get stuck but a bumper-jack and a winch would usually take c

Your Tesla will drive itself onto an autonomous ocean-going barge which will set off around the Cape of Good Hope to dock on the other coast where the barge will disgorge a smouldering heap of wreckage.

It's like with cops and robbers. The thief needs to get lucky every single time, the cops only need to get lucky once. With AI it's even more unfair, not only does the AI only need to learn to drive once, after which it is always better -- but it can be incrementally improved besides, and possesses fundamentally superior perception and reaction time.

In the near term future, say 3-8 years, accident injuries and deaths will plummet as this technology is adopted. The notion of letting just anybody drive with minimal training will seem as barbaric as surgery without washing your hands first. The cost savings in both human suffering as well as dollars will have us scratching our heads on why we didn't mandate this earlier. I fully expect my grandchildren to be both amazed as well as slightly horrified that I drove along with millions of others at high speed despite the risk of drunks / sleepy / distracted drivers killing us.

"The cost savings in both human suffering as well as dollars will have us scratching our heads on why we didn't mandate this earlier."

Oh God.... here we go again...

It was not and will not be mandated for some time due to technological limitations. The concept probably goes back decades or more but what will happen is that when it comes to fruition there will be a gaggle of Musk worshipers who will claim that no one had the idea before Musk and no one "worked" on the idea until after Musk brought it to the masses in a tidy little package. Anyone else who puts this out will be compared to Edison and called a thief and a cheat by this gang of fanboys. Endless Facebook memes will give Musk credit for making anything worthwhile in his lifetime and even credit him with some inventions that were patented before his lifetime just like how they're doing with Tesla today.

Musk was wise in choosing the name of his auto company as that's what he'll end up being in technology history.... another engineer given the credit for other peoples' work and others vilified for their accomplishments.

You losers will even be claiming that he was "an alien" that was "centuries ahead of his time" and without which we'd "still be living in the dark ages."

Which is interesting because there have been plenty of train wrecks due to human problems(drivers going too fast, drunk, not trained eough). The thing about computer control is that trains dont go overspeed or drive recklessly. Perfect control does not exist.

The first funny problem is when you are in NYC and you accidentally bum dial your LA car to come get you. You arrive back in LA to find your car "stolen" so you bring up you app to find that it is getting its kicks on route 66.

The other is when you move from NYC to LA but still haven't updated your contact list to say that "Home" is in LA not NYC. You drunkenly get into your car and say, "Home James" it then proceeds to take you to your old address in NYC. You are hung over so you don't wake until 2pm, 12 hours after leaving. It has been doing a fairly steady 70 for 12 hours, putting you over 800 miles from home. Also this translates to a 12 hour ride to return.

Your sub $40k car is not going to come from a high tech startup shaking up the industry. It's going to come from the competition once they realise what is happening and get on the bandwagon.

I say go more expensive. Increase the funds to drive the innovation which can trickle down to the rest of us through other means. I believe I will be driving a self driving electric car sometime in the next 15 years, but not necessarily a Tesla.

I definitely want to pay a steep premium to purchase my own tiny little train car. I especially can't wait until the release the software update that automatically drives me to the police station if the computer hears me say anything seditious.

Whether or not Tesla is able to get the car to self drive that distance is not in any way shape or form related to whether it will be legal.

Personally I think that it would be extremely unlikely for self driving cars to not become a reality. There is too much money being spent on it by too many smart people. It may be that the US ends up being late to the game though due to the nature of the US legal system.

Musk was saying two years several months ago. He should be saying 18 months not doubling it to 3 years.

I in no way believe autonomous cars will replace humans in all everyday driving situations until all generic visual captchas (not specific algorithms for specific types) can be solved better than humans. If Google can't read plainly visible obvious to human house numbers 4% of the time in no way are they ready to put a real autonomous car on the road.

Personally I think that it would be extremely unlikely for self driving cars to not become a reality. There is too much money being spent on it by too many smart people. It may be that the US ends up being late to the game though due to the nature of the US legal system.

Eventually. Like speech recognition, which also seemed to always be 3-5 years out until it finally went mainstream a few years ago. But I'm thinking more like 2030 or 2040 than 2020 at least around here, from what I can tell they haven't even begun to test snow and ice. I totally understand why they start with making it work under optimal conditions, but it also means they have a looooooooong way to go with non-optimal conditions.

The big difference between speech recognition and self driving cars is there is serious serious money in the cars. And seriously massive impacts on transport infrastructure that will absolutely make governments sit up and take notice.

My own theory is that cities will start to put an autonomous zone around their centres meaning cars that enter that ring either have to be in self drive mode or pay a significant toll. The increased flow rate, the ability to control pathing, and the wider impacts that would h

Eventually. Like speech recognition, which also seemed to always be 3-5 years out until it finally went mainstream a few years ago

Speech recognition didn't go mainstream because it improved, it went mainstream because someone found a use-case for it (essentially, the UI on phones is so much more painful than a computer that it's worth trying speech-to-text, whereas on a computer it's easier to type).

Speech recognition in the 1990s, or even the 2000s, was awful. It didn't lack use cases; it lacked truly massive storage and processing power, and (for the best recognition) the always-on-nearly-everywhere network infrastructure to support shipping off sound samples to the the sites where that storage and processing lives. Until processors and infrastructure reached that tipping point, it just didn't work well enough to be useful outside of niche cases.

Yes, but when would you say Speech tech actually reached primetime? Even if you said it wasn't ready in the 90s, Siri was released properly by Mai 2012.That means Speech Tech was primetime ready somewhere between 2000 and 2011.And thats ignoring if there was firms that had solutions that was waste ahead during the 90.

The funny part is snow and ICE conditions only really depend on loop tuning. In many regards this seems like one of the easier problems to solve but at the same time one that will quickly show how much safer self driving cars can be while at the same time pissing off the users of these cars once they learn what "driving to conditions" actually means.

After all we already have a plethora of systems that attempt to make driving on the snow similar to driving on the normal road by taking control away from the u

... from what I can tell they haven't even begun to test snow and ice. I totally understand why they start with making it work under optimal conditions, but it also means they have a looooooooong way to go with non-optimal conditions.

Different manufacturers (Lexus, BMW) have done automated highway driving for years. Highway driving is the easy one. I know you think Tesla invented the idea, but they really didn't. It isn't hard to make a car follow lane markers on a highway and avoid other cars. The hard part is the 20% of the rest. Get a grip on how complex non-highway driving is.

I have a nice shiny new BMW - it's even bespoke! I'm pretty sure that there's some automated driving bits available if I ever figure out the menu and wanted to enable it. The missus figured it out at one point? Basically, you tell it to try to drive with traffic but only go so fast. Then you tell it to stay in the damned lane and it seems to do that too. I gotta tell ya, I have no idea and can't imagine why I'd have bought a BMW only to have it drive itself. I find the very idea an abomination but I'm prett

Oh silly you. I don't own it to impress you - I own it because I want it. I have a bunch of cars, actually. The BMW is just one tool for one particular job. I don't expect you to recognize the value of an old Volvo, a really old Jeep, or a Saab from the early 1990s. It's okay - I'm not trying to impress you. I'm enjoying myself. Silly you. You think your opinion matters in regards to my purchasing habits. Nope. The BMW is an awesome driver's car and a bunch of fun. It's even low-key. Unless you recognize it

My thoughts on autonomous driving and car enthusiasts like yourself has always been:with more people being driving around in autonomous cars, driving on the road yourself could become a lot less frustrating (less idiots on the road, more predictable traffic).

Also I don't see the appeal of driving yourself when it's bumper to bumper traffic. Stop, wait, slow, stop, wait, slow... that is the kind of situation where you'd want to car to do the driving so you can do other things with your time. A lot of high en

You might want to get a better grip on reality. Tesla Autopilot is already 80% of the way there, and the other 20% may not be available to consumers yet, but it has had millions of miles of testing...

It seems that Slashdot has been infested with willfully ignorant ball-less trolls. This is supposed to be a site for nerds. There is no greater nerd than Elon Musk. He is infused in sci-fi. He builds rockets...he designed much of the first SpaceX rocket (Falcon-1) himself. He builds arguably the best car in the world, and certainly the most technologically advanced (the Model S). It has the most advanced auto-driving features of any production car in the world. He literally bet the entire fortune he made from the sale of Paypal (200 million dollars) on Tesla and SpaceX after the 2008 market crash; most so called capitalists in our elite would never take such risks. Any libertarians amongst the readership here should worship Musk. He is more the Ayn Randian superhero than anyone I can think of. And if they return that Musk has taken some government help (like money for building the Dragon capsule to ferry cargo to the Space station for NASA or a $7500 subsidy for clean energy vehicle purchases), I would ask them what they think of defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin who receive 75% or more of their income from government contracts, or oil companies who have literally had wars fought in their name by governments. If those so-called libertarians don't denounce such things, then they are the worst type of corporate troll hypocrites.

Musk is a businessman first, nerd second. And this is a site for nerds - nerds most of whome probably drive and can see the huge number of situations in which a self drive car is going to exhibit behaviour very very far from the optimal, all of which have been mentioned in other posts so I won't re-iterate. If you want to swallow the musk kool aid thats up to you, but those of us who see beyond the blantant marketeering and angling for investment cash might hold off on the congrats for a while.

I think you need it, because, um, you do. You don't think you can drive non-approved vehicles on public roads do you? You need Federal approval of kids car seats! You need state approval as well depending on the road you are on.

Well, on the highways that the Feds pay for... Yes, you do. These things will never be certifiable, as they're bragging about machine learning which is non-deterministic and therefore no responsible certifying body will approve it for life safety critical applications.

Sure they will be certifiable. There are no standards that will prevent it.

NHTSA issues the FMVSS, which establish minimum performance requirements for safety systems; anything not required by a FMVSS standard is outside NHTSA's juris

To summon your car from the East coast and have it drive.....empty..... to the West coast...what a waste of energy.

I don't think any sane person would bother summoning their car from across the country, unless they're moving one-way and didn't want to drive it.

I predict that most people who summon their car will have parked it nearby already, such as people leaving a concert, a play, or the mall, or perhaps people who want to get picked up from their home airport after returning from a trip.

I have no love for Musk but I must say, people seem to like him. I took a huge risk and bought 2000 shares in Tesla when they were $24 each. (I think that was the price. Somewhere around there.) I haven't actually checked the latest prices but that's because I have no desire to unload them yet and "there'll be time enough for counting, when the dealings done."

So, if you attract as much geek-glee as Musk and get a bunch of people to listen to you - then I might take a shot on investing in your scheme too. Un